Hideo Kojima Gives More Insight Into The Meaning Behind His New Game's Title

One of the most talked about games from this year's E3 event in Los Angeles, California that took place back in the middle of June, was Kojima Productions' Death Stranding. The upcoming title has a strange name and Kojima explained it a bit in a new interview.

A 'strand' in psychology is often used to refer to ties or chains. So how all the crabs [in the trailer] have this weird umbilical cord and how the baby is tied to Norman [Reedus' character] is a representation of this.

Digital Spy preceded that quote by explaining the phenomenon known as cetacean stranding, where lots of sea creatures end up dead on the beach from dehydration. It's something that occasionally happens in real life and it was the theme of the trailer that aired during E3 for Death Stranding, a trailer you can check out below to get some context for the relation to what Kojima and Digital Spy are talking about.

Kojima explains to Digital Spy that after reading a short story discussing the importance of a stick -- that it was used early on by mankind to ward off danger while also being used as a way to communicate -- and the importance of rope -- used to keep things close by -- he explained that he wants Death Stranding to be about keeping away the bad, communicating while also keeping things close.

In Kojima's own words, he states...

I want the story and the world and the gameplay, as well as the characters in the game and the the player -- the life and death elements -- all to be tied together,

So ultimately this is a game about life and death and the strands that tie it all together. However, that's oversimplifying a much more complex game dealing with far more mysterious elements.

Kojima hasn't exactly explained what Death Stranding is actually about. All we know is that we play Norman Reedus and that the game will be similar in some ways to The Division or Uncharted 4, insofar that it's a third-person game.

Previous to announcing the game at E3, Kojima had been venturing around looking for a good game engine. He took a world tour with designer Mark Cerny to check out various studios that have made games for the PlayStation consoles, getting ideas and putting together possibilities as to how he would want the game to run.

Unfortunately the Fox Engine is still under Konami's brand, and after spending nearly half a decade designing it, it must have really hurt to have to let it go, especially considering that the technology was a real breakthrough for highly scalable content that could achieve near photorealistic rendering on low-end hardware. Impressive stuff. It was also the engine that powered the latest PES games and Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, Kojima Productions' swan song for Konami.

For now, Death Stranding is still heavy in development and a long ways off from release. Don't expect to get any substantial news about the game until near the end of this year or next year. Death Stranding will release first on the PS4.